I still haven’t recovered from my parade, and it’s been very busy here in the CatBox.  Yesterday, I was so exhausted that I fouled-up uploading my articles to Care2.  Today I’ve been scheduling medical mayhem.  I wanted to prepare for the monthly report, but I had to write a letter to the parole board for one of my guys.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:32 (average 4:24).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): President Donald Trump’s Mind-Control Superpowers

The pundits overcomplicate the matter. Trump is a perfect reflection of the beliefs and policies of the Republican Party in the mind of an addled pervert. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From CNN: Former President Bill Clinton said that impeachment hearings would have begun if a Democratic president, instead of Donald Trump, were in power and the Russia investigation was as far along as it is now.

"I think if the roles were reversed — now, this is me just talking, but it’s based on my experience — if it were a Democratic president, and these facts were present, most people I know in Washington believe impeachment hearings would have begun already," Clinton told "CBS Sunday Morning."

Bill should know why!  IOKIYAR! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Think Progress: For all the horrible things that President Donald Trump says and does from the Oval Office, his own words and deeds may not actually pose the greatest challenge to our democracy. Rather, the real threat to our way of life might be the countless, unnamed, mostly-white Americans who approve of — and feel emboldened by — the illiberal, white-supremacist tinge to the rhetoric that emanates from the White House on a near-daily basis.

Hyperbole? Alarmist, left-wing extremism? Over-the-top balderdash, you say? Not at all. But don’t take my word for it. Instead, allow me to point in the direction of a groaning shelf of scholarly research that suggests the current White House occupant may only be the spear’s tip of America’s unraveling democracy.

The most recent such study comes from political scientists Steven V. Miller at Clemson University and Nicholas T. Davis at Texas A&M University.  Their working paper – “White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy” – fires a warning shot to signal a budding threat to the nation. Miller and Davis collected and compared polling data compiled between 1995 and 2011 by the World Values Survey and discovered an escalating impulse among some white Americans to embrace “an unwillingness to associate or fraternize with individuals whose cultural, racial, or religious ideas or ways differ” from their own. They identified such attitudes as “socially intolerant,” which they also found to correlate with a willingness to sacrifice democratic notions, such as political compromise or respect for minority rights, if such principles conflicted with their selfish interests.

Miller and Davis, for example, found the percentage of socially intolerant whites doubled from 12.6 percent in 1995 to 24.9 percent in 2011, when the most recent survey figures were available.

Chick through for the rest. I question the willingness of Trump and the Republican Party to cede power, when legally required to do so. They are preparing storm-troopers to help them keep power by force. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

Dang!  I was made a dishonerary Republican.   I got a parade!  I had completely forgotten that the Portland Rose Festival Starlight parade, which passes under my window, was last night.  I had just fallen asleep when the bands started playing.  It was almost midnight when the street cleaners finished up, so I’m pretty pooped today.  Here’s a pic:

WWWendy will be here in about 40 minutes, and I hope to finish writing by the time she arrives.

She just left, and I am WAY pooped.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:36 (average 5:17).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (NY Times Channel): Palestinian Medic Killed by Israeli Soldiers at Gaza Protest

What a tragic loss this courageous young woman was when the state of Israel murdered her with the full support of the US Republican Party. I have a reason for calling the war criminal that executed her Butcher Bibi.  It’s time to reinstate Nuremburg.  RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Washington Post: L’etat, c’est Trump.

For months we’ve heard President Trump’s TV lawyers, as he calls them, bandy about the argument that he — or any president, for that matter — couldn’t have obstructed justice because justice is what he says it is.

In other words, that because, they claim, a president possesses absolute power to cut short a criminal investigation, he cannot by definition be guilty of obstructing it. Or, in the famous Nixonian formulation, as Richard M. Nixon told David Frost, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

But as much as the president’s legal team foreshadowed this contention, it was nonetheless breathtaking to see it spelled out, in uncaveated black and white, in a letter from Trump’s legal team to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

“A President can also order the termination of an investigation by the Justice Department or FBI at any time and for any reason,” the lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, wrote in the January letter, obtained by the New York Times. “Such an action obviously has an impact on the investigation, but that is simply an effect of the President’s lawful exercise of his constitutional power and cannot constitute obstruction of justice.”

Republicans have pushed this absurd Nazi claim for a long time. The last time we saw it was from Fuhrer GW Bush of the Fourth Reich. He claimed to be the unitary executive. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From The New Yorker: President Donald J. Trump made Vice-President Mike Pence watch him issue pardons for several hours to see how it is done, a White House source confirmed.

According to the source, Trump pardoned a number of disgraced political figures and former reality-show cronies for the sole purpose of training Pence in the art of issuing pardons.

After signing pardon after pardon while Pence looked on intently, Trump commanded the Vice-President to sign a “practice pardon” to prove that he “wouldn’t mess anything up,” the source said.

Before trying his hand at issuing a pardon, Pence heaped praise on Trump for the pardoning demonstration he had just given.

Andy is reporting straight news again. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

A flashback from 2011.

It’s been a hectic day here at the CatBox.  CCC may have found me a new CatBox.  Tomorrow, please expect no more than a Personal Update.  I’m wheeling to the Golden West Building about sixteen blocks away with a CCC Manager to check it out and see if it can accommodate my needs.  That will also interfere with my EOM routine here, so the new poll and monthly report will probably be late.  My second article was Samantha Bee, but her videos from yesterday’s show have been removed from YouTube.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:28 (average 4:19).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Uncovered Secret Memo Could Shed More Light On President Trump Firing Comey

Drip… Drip… Drip… RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Alternet: Federal prosecutors have charged two brothers with bilking Republicans across the country of “more than $50 million” in a giant scam where they posed as conservative political action committees (PACs) dedicated to furthering right-wing causes like supporting law enforcement and opposing reproductive rights.

“These nine PACS—which collectively raised more than $23 million between 2014 and 2017, and more than $50 million the last 10 years—were scams, operated to enrich the defendants and their co-conspirators,” the federal indictment said. “The PACs targeted victims across the country, including in the Southern District of New York, raising funds on the fraudulent basis that donations would support education regarding, and the political campaigns of those who supported, ‘autism awareness,’ ‘law enforcement appreciation,’ and pro-life causes.”

“In truth and fact, virtually all of the money raised was paid to the scheme participants or else used to perpetuate the fraud through additional telemarketing and fundraising expenditures,” the indictment continued. “Less than 1 percent of all donor money to the PACs was spent on political contributions during the relevant time period.”

The brothers had the audacity to compete with the party’s own sheeple fleecing.  Either way, SCAMS are all Republicans have to offer. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Daily Kos: The study was sui generis: Two Harvard Law professors, Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang, set out to analyze 1,400 federal judges’ sentencing practices over a 15-year period affecting more than 500,000 defendants. The results were predictable but disheartening.

They unearthed a stunning number of influences on sentencing, from years of experience and level of racism in a state to the party of appointment. Its major finding: Republican-appointed judges give black defendants harsher sentences than their white counterparts.

“Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to three more months than similar nonblacks. … These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.”

Three months’ discrepancy accounts for 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap, meaning the average sentence disparity between similarly situated white and black defendants. The convictions driving the gap: serious drug and violent offenses.

Racism is a plank in the Republican platform. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon: